The title announces
one of the
two linked elements that Gagos and van Minnen give us in this book: a
general discussion of dispute processing in Egypt from the late third to
mid-seventh century as reflected in Greek papyri (a list of 41 settlements
of disputes is given on pp. 121-27). The other part is the hook on which
this discussion is hung, the full publication of a long papyrus of the
sixth century in which the settlement of a property dispute is recorded in
detail. Both parts make substantial contributions to our understanding of
late antique Egypt and of the social context of law in the later Roman
world. For reasons to which we shall return, however, the two elements are
not really very closely connected. The volume is the first in a welcome
new series from the University of Michigan Press, providing a local venue
for publication of papyri and other new texts, something Michigan has not
had since the disappearance of the Humanistic Series of the
University of Michigan Studies.

The document is certainly an
impressive and interesting one, complete except for probably three lines
lost at the start (containing the date, alas; Gagos and van Minnen argue
for ca. 537)1 and a few largely abraded
lines at the end of the
signatures of the witnesses. Otherwise only small holes -- rarely
difficult
to fill -- interrupt the majestic flow of 113 lines of notarial Greek. The
first 24 lines, preserved in the Vatican Library, were published in 1980
by R. Pintaudi as P.Vat.Aphrod. 10; they are given here in an
improved text. The rest were discovered when a roll in Michigan was opened
more recently. The papyrus belongs to the archive of the poet, notary, and
landowner Dioskoros of Aphrodito, one of the central figures of the
documentation and study of sixth-century Egypt. A good introduction to the
archive and its setting -- not at all a typical village of its time, the
editors rightly note -- is given here (pp. 8-23); it continues to be a
lively area of research.2 This roll
evidently came into Dioskoros'
hands as part of the papers of his father Apollos, who represented the
parties to whom it is addressed.

The principals on his side were
Phoibammon son of Triadelphos and his wife Anastasia alias Tekrompia.
Phoibammon is a well-known figure, studied in a classic article by J. G.
Keenan3; he was a landowner, middleman,
and lender in the village of
Aphrodito, important because he shows that in economic relations between
villagers and urbanites the villagers were not always the ones who lost
their land. The present papyrus allows us to see that his wife was a
cousin of Dioskoros, the daughter of a sister of Apollos. The other party
is one Nikantinoos, otherwise unknown, who is, although originally from
Aphrodito, now living in Antinoopolis.

The dispute concerned a
piece of
property, probably a vineyard, in Aphrodito, which had belonged to
Nikantinoos' parents. They had mortgaged it to an unnamed couple who drew
the mortgage up to the benefit of their son Joseph.4 After the
parents' death, Nikantinoos' nieces and nephews (named Eudoxia, Antonia,
and Kollouthos) sold the property to Phoibammon and Anastasia; the
mortgage, however, has been paid off by Nikantinoos. In the settlement,
Phoibammon and Anastasia pay Nikantinoos a substantial sum -- 7 solidi
plus
20 artabas of wheat, or roughly the equivalent of four years' income for
an ordinary worker -- and Nikantinoos renounces any claim to the property,
turning the paid-off mortgage document over to Phoibammon and Anastasia.

So much is clear; but the settlement is interested in preventing
future
litigation, not in giving a precise account of the past dispute. So we do
not learn why Nikantinoos is a party to this dispute: Was he a partial
heir? Gagos and van Minnen suggest that the three sellers were left the
property, Nikantinoos the debt, but there is no evidence for this. We know
nothing of the terms of his parents' will, nor if Nikantinoos' sibling
(and parent of the trio)5 is still alive.
Why are Phoibammon and
Anastasia willing to pay such a large sum to Nikantinoos? Who initiated
the dispute? Gagos and van Minnen assume (e.g., on p. 123) that it was the
buyers, but there is again no evidence for this view.

The editors'
view of
the matter is most fully set out on pp. 23-26, although they do not
consider why if, as they believe, the purchasers' position was vulnerable,
they did not proceed against the sellers for having sold them an
encumbered property. The sale no doubt contained a guarantee of freedom
from such encumbrance and an undertaking to repel all comers. What case
could the buyers have against Nikantinoos?

Although I cannot argue
the
case in detail here, it seems worth considering the possibility that it
was Nikantinoos who launched the litigation. If he inherited a share of
ownership in the vineyard, along with a brother or sister, and if the
survivors of the sibling sold their share, he might well find his position
intolerable, faced with co-owners he did not want and a debt burden
ignored by the new co-owners. We cannot know the details, but this
settlement would then be an outcome in which he was fully extricated from
the entanglement and probably made whole or something close to
it.6
After all, it would be most remarkable for Phoibammon and Anastasia to
initiate litigation if their case was so weak that it led to a substantial
payment.

The skepticism about the editors' reconstruction that I
have
expressed does not in the least detract from a fine professional job of
editing: a sound text7 and apparatus, a
good translation (occasionally
marred by unidiomatic English or the importation of too free an
interpretive rendering), and an excellent commentary, amply documented
with parallels and bibliography. The plates at the end, although small,
make it possible to check most readings.8

The general discussion of
dispute processing occupies sections 9-10 (pp. 30-46) of the introduction.
Gagos and van Minnen argue that mediation and arbitration are forms of
social discourse and not only of legal action. They point out acutely that
Dioskoros owned a manuscript of Menander's Epitrepontes, with
its arbitration scene; more generally they see the use of settlements as
part of the Romanization of Egypt. Moving on to propose an anthropological
approach to legal aspects of developed society, they try to understand the
role of consensual settlements in late antique Egypt.

I have no
doubt that
they are right in their invocation of the parties' existing relationship
as a key consideration, along with the object of controversy, in the
manner of conducting the disputing process. That the restoration of social
relations is an essential part of the resolution of such a situation is
hardly a new idea, even for Egypt,9 but
Gagos and van Minnen give a
sensible discussion of the point. Their concluding expression of "hope to
have shown that a satisfactory picture of settling disputes in late
antique Egypt is only possible if we take the social context into account"
(p. 47) is almost poignant when one considers our inability to do just
that for the papyrus they publish here.10 If we knew who Nikantinoos'
family were and how they were connected to the power elite of
Aphrodito -- in which Apollos as protokometes was a key
figure -- it would be much easier to approach some of the unanswered
questions that this settlement poses.

Gagos and van Minnen also try
to
come to grips with the question of why settlement documents are so
numerous in late antique Egypt. They suggest that the growing complexity,
cost, and duration of litigation drove people to use arbitration and
mediation more extensively; but the growing difficulty of litigation is
only postulated, and the notion that this could be a "byproduct of the
codification of Roman law" (p. 40) is more than a little paradoxical. It
is not as if it was easier to determine the law before
codification, after all. And with the subdivision of the province of Egypt
by Diocletian, the ultimate appellate court for a province would have been
closer at hand than it ever had been for most Egyptians. The hostility of
Christian thinking to litigation among believers (evoked pp. 44-45) may be
a more promising candidate, but then how to explain the revival of the use
of the courts by Christians after the Arab conquest (p. 42)?11

All of
the above makes it clear that we should take seriously the word "toward"
in the subtitle. The authors make no pretense of having offered such a
legal anthropology. What they have done, and done with imagination,
intelligence, and zest, is to sketch out the approach they favor. That
they cannot realize their project for the papyrus they publish is
symptomatic of the difficulties that stand in the path. But we are much
indebted to them for both their edition of this enigmatic papyrus and a
formidable challenge.

NOTES

[1] The
basis is shaky. On p. 23
the
editors establish the range as 527 (accession of Justinian, mentioned in
the oath formula) to 538 (Apollos leaves secular life to found a monastery
and becomes Apa Apollos). They then (pp. 110-11) argue for 537
specifically because the one precise parallel to the oath formula falls in
that year. That seems, even if true, hardly adequate to support a
speculation; and it is not true. In the article on oath formulas by K. A.
Worp cited on p. 110, we find that SB V 8029 does not give
"the exact wording of this oath formula," and there are another four
documents without precise dates that have the same formula as
SB V 8029. It is hardly likely that all date from 537.

[2] A long discussion (pp. 10-15) treats
P.Cair.Masp. III 67283,
a petition to the empress Theodora dating to 547/8, which bears the
signatures of the power elite of Aphrodito. The claim that the petition
was signed at "a general meeting of the adult male inhabitants of
Aphrodito to discuss the petition" (p. 13) is hardly likely to be right;
there is no evidence for such town meetings. A similar idea of village
institutions can be found in the same authors' article, "Documenting the
Rural Economy of Byzantine Egypt: Three Papyri from Alabastrine,"
Journal of Roman Archaeology 5 (1992) 186-202.

[4]
Joseph, as
things stand, is nowhere given a fuller identification. This leads the
editors (p. 86) to suppose that "the identity of Iosephius is not really
important in this text." I think that it is impossible to have introduced
his name in such a cavalier fashion in a formal legal document. Gagos and
van Minnen reject the idea of restoring a patronymic -- the minimum legal
identification -- in line 12, because "the space is too short," and they
restore UI(OU= there instead. But there are four-letter
patronymics in common use, like *BHSA= or *MHNA=, so this argument is
unconvincing, and UI(OU= is in any case redundant (even by the standards
of this prolix notary).

[5] Who are not
inheriting from an aunt and
uncle, as the editors say on p. 88, but from grandparents.

[6] Note
that in lines 57-61 it is Nikantinoos who is renouncing the possibility of
future legal action. It is of course possible that another
dialysis was drawn up by/for Phoibammon and Anastasia.

[7]
I am referring to the "transcription" (pp. 67-73), which is a traditional
papyrological text with annotation. The "reading text" given opposite the
translation (pp. 50-63) has its attractions, and in a papyrus with few
restorations it is not seriously misleading. But the absence of brackets
means that restorations are presented on the same footing as preserved
text, and with most papyri this would be a disastrous practice.

[8] A
few technical grumbles may be registered here. Though a full publication,
this has no volume number in the Michigan Papyri, no serial
number for the papyrus, and no abbreviation proposed by the editors. The
insistent Latinization of proper names in transliteration produces "Muses"
(p. 61) for *MOUSH=S, which is for *MWUSH=S, Moses. On p. 118 there is
twice
a cross-reference to an apparently nonexistent note to lines 108-110.

[9] E.g., D. W. Hobson, "The Impact of Law on
Village Life in Roman
Egypt," Law, Politics and Society in the Ancient Mediterranean
World, edd. B. Halpern and D. W. Hobson (Sheffield 1993) 193-219;
R. S. Bagnall, "Official and Private Violence in Roman Egypt,"
BASP 26 (1989) 201-16, both cited in the bibliography of this
volume.

[10] For that matter, even deciding if
this is an arbitration
or a mediation seems problematic, despite the clear distinction drawn on
pp. 30-31, where they opt for mediation. So too pp. 26 and 123; but in the
paragraphing of the reading text, translation, and commentary, they
describe lines 17-28 as an arbitration. The latter is right, I think: the
friends decide (E)DIKAI/WSAN -- as the editors note, p. 91, a
legal term) what is to happen, and the decisions are referred to later as
KRI/SIS (line 30) and TA\ DO/CANTA (lines 36, 54, 73, 100), the language
of decree, not mediation.

[11] On the other
hand, Gagos and van Minnen
are surely right to reject intra-Christian confessional differences as an
explanation, p. 43.